Canada's Task To Legalize Recreational Marijuana

“All eyes are on Canada,” said Ritchard Findlay, chief executive officer of Teal Valley, a Canadian medical marijuana company during a week long cannabis conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia last week.

A dispensary in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Canada has an established national medical marijuana program within Health Canada that is well respected by many other countries and looked up to as a model to follow. The program is still making adjustments and improvements as it matures and determines what is and isn't working. Now the country is tasked with figuring out how to legalize recreational marijuana.

A task force was established and has been given the job to figure out to to deliver Prime Minister Trudeau's legalization promise. The expectation is that recreational marijuana will happen sometime in 2017. Susan Boyd, a professor at the University of Victoria and a member of the task force. “The big question is what's next,” she said. “Certain myths are quite enduring, They become moral issues and so it doesn't matter about the evidence or our research conclusions.”

She noted the task force is still studying the issues. “We're still doing the round table discussions and so we're still just hearing from people,” she said. “We're still a bit in the infancy.”

The Canadian Institute hosted the Canadian Cannabis Business Week in order to bring together the various cannabis insiders to have an open dialogue about the issues surrounding retail marijuana. Boyd felt that if it weren't for all the work of the activists, the negative image of marijuana would have remained the overriding voice. Barry Smith, a senior researcher at the Canadian Institute said, "It's important for our country to have these discussions and rather than trying to cover multiple topics through a couple of rushed days, we felt a deep dive into each area would be beneficial."

While Vancouver is fairly permissive with pretty visible marijuana store front dispensaries, other areas of the country are more conservative. For example, some attendees noted that conservative communities like Saskatchewan are not at permissive as Vancouver and just this past year during May in Toronto police launched, Project Claudia that raided many dispensaries and seized 269 kilos of dried cannabis and arrested 90 people.

So, the country has to decide whether the provinces should try to set their own limits or keep a standard program across the country. They have just attempted to cut back on personal growing of medical marijuana and have felt a strong backlash. Partly, because many people were growing marijuana and selling small amounts for profit in the black market and partly because it was economical for many patients.

A similar comparison could be made in the states. Just because Colorado took the plunge, that doesn't mean the good folks of Oklahoma want legalized recreational pot. While that seems like a reasonable approach, to let each state or province in Canada's case decide its marijuana comfort level, it also creates a crazy patchwork of laws and great confusion.

Canadians are also very concerned about the criminal element associated with marijuana. Americans rarely discuss the organized crime aspect of marijuana, while in Canada it gets a lot of attention in the media. The medical community has its share of good players with companies like privately-owned Tilray, which is one of Canada's leading medical marijuana companies or Tweed, another medical marijuana company that is valued at over $300 million.

However, the black market is rumored to be run by Hells Angels biker gangs and Asian gangs and there is a concern within the legalization community that it doesn't want to enrich these criminal organizations. They want to wrestle the industry away from the gangs and that could prove difficult to do.

Ultimately, the majority of Canadians seem to be in favor of legalizing and decriminalizing marijuana. They really seem to sincerely want to get it right. It looks as if these open, honest discussions among those with a vested interest is a great approach to what is a complicated matter.

I am the Co-Founder, CEO, and Editor-In-Chief of www.GreenMarketReport, a financial news site for the cannabis industry. Prior to this, I spent over 15 years working in a variety of jobs in the securities industry before getting my Masters Degree in Journalism at NYU. As a f...